Thursday, July 10, 2008

On Long Posts And Girl Artists

I want to write a long post on the argument by a British art critic that there has never been a great woman artist and never will be one, either. My argument requires a long post, it really does. But do people read long posts? And does a long post strike them as profoundly as sound bites of the above type?

Here's the real problem: It's very easy to make a statement like the one above. It's much harder to answer it, because I can't just go: Fuck off, asshole.

Well, I can, because ultimately the meaning of the original argument is no different from that, on some emotional level. But this arguing game is rigged to benefit those who make outrageous claims with no evidence and those who think "nuances" are misspellings for "nuisances". It's rigged to benefit those who have never read an art history book about the lives of female artists, and it's also rigged to benefit those who have never asked themselves what (and who) defines "great" art as opposed to some other type of art and whether that definition in itself might not have something to do with the cultural and gender-specific values that give birth to all art (and abort some of it).

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